I never live with balance
I always wake up nervous
Light comes at me sideways
I hold my breath forever

I never live with balance
Though I’ve always liked the notion
I feel that endless hunger
For energy and motion

Open
Open
Open

I never live with balance
I wanna feel you near me
There’s an aching in my hipbone
Wanna let my heart drop open
It’s daylight in the city
There’s thumping in the stairwell
Kundalini sunrise
A clamoring of church bells

Open
Open
Open

You like to let me worry
But I don’t take you for granted
Come over here and kiss me
I’m savoring your picture
The street is filled with noises
Life going up and down
Light comes at you sideways
Enfolds you like a gown

The village idiot takes the throne
His the wind in which all must sway
All sane people, die now
Be lifted up and carried away
You’ve got no home in this world of sorrows

There’s a parasite feeding on
Everybody’s bag of rage
What goes out returns again
To smite the mouth and burn the page
Under the rain of all our dark tomorrows

I can see in the dark it’s where I used to live
I see excess and the gaping need
Follow the money – see where it leads
It’s to shrunken men stuffed up with greed
They meet and make plans in strange half-lit tableaux

Picture on magazine boardroom pop star
Pinstripe prophet of peckerhead greed
You say ‘Trust me with the money — the keys to the universe’
Trickle down will give us everything we need

Brand new century private penitentiary
bank vault utopia padded for the few
And it’s tumours for the masses coughing for the masses
Earphones for the masses and they all serve you

Trickle down give /em the business
Trickle down supposed to give us the goods
Cups held out to catch a bit of the bounty
Trickle down everywhere trickle down blood

What used to pass for education now looks more like ignoration
Take the people’s money and slip it to the corporation
Yellow rain golden shower pesticide firepower
Summon feudal demons of sweatshop subjugation

As I stare into the flames
filled up with feelings I can’t name
Images of life appear —
regret and anger, love and fear
Dark things drift across the screen
of mine behind whose veil are seen
love’s ferocious eyes, and clear
the words come flying to my ear

Go on — put it in your heart —
Put it in your heart

Terrible deeds done in the name
of tunnel vision and fear of change
surely are expressions of
a soul that’s turned its back on love
All the sirens all the tongues
The song of air in every lung
Heaven’s perfect alchemy
put me with you and you with me

Come on — put that in your heart
Come on, put it in your heart

All the sirens all the tongues
The song of air in every lung
Heaven’s perfect alchemy
Put me with you and you with me

Abe Lincoln once turned to somebody and said,
“Do you ever find yourself talking with the dead?”

There are three tiny deaths heads carved out of mammoth tusk
on the ledge in my bathroom
They grin at me in the morning when I’m taking a leak,
but they say very little.

Outside Phnom Penh there’s a tower, glass paneled,
maybe ten meters high
filled with skulls from the killing fields
Most of them lack the lower jaw
so they don’t exactly grin
but they whisper, as if from a great distance,
of pain, and of pain left far behind

Eighteen thousand empty eyeholes peering out at the four directions

Electric fly buzz, green moist breeze
Bone-colored Brahma bull grazes wet-eyed,
hobbled in hollow of mass grave
In the neighboring field a small herd
of young boys plays soccer,
their laughter swallowed in expanding silence

This is too big for anger,
it’s too big for blame.
We stumble through history so
humanly lame
So I bow down my head
Say a prayer for us all
That we don’t fear the spirit
when it comes to call

The sun will soon slide down into the far end of the ancient reservoir.
Orange ball merging with its water-borne twin
below air-brushed edges of cloud.
But first, it spreads itself,

The rains are late this year.
The sky has no more tears to shed.
But from the air Cambodia remains
a disc of wet green, bordered by bright haze.
Water-filled bomb craters, sun streaked gleam
stitched in strings across patchwork land and
march west toward the far hills of Thailand.
Macro analog of Ankor Wat’s temple walls
intricate bas-relief of thousand-year-old battles
pitted with AK rounds

And under the sign of the seven headed cobra
the naga who sees in all directions
seven million landmines lie in terraced grass, in paddy, in bush
(Call it a minescape now)

Sally holds the beggar’s hand and cries
at his scarred up face and absent eyes
and right leg gone from above the knee

Wild things are prowling – storm winds are howling tonight
Everything’s transforming into pure crystals of light
The heart is a mirror; it throws back the blaze of love
Bathed in that glow it’s no secret what I’m thinking of

I want to wait no more
Wait no more
Wait no more

Sipping wine with angels in this torch-lit tavern by the sea
What does it take for what’s locked up inside to be free?
Fold me into you, you know where I’m dying to be
When my ship sets sail on that ocean of deep mystery

I want to wait no more
Wait no more
Wait no more

What does it take for the heart to explode into stars?
One day we’ll wake to remember how lovely we are
Lightning’s a kiss that lands hot on the loins of the sky
Something uncoils at the base of my spine and I cry

Nobody’s making me say this
I’m talking to you
Been travelþing 17 hours
Irradiated by signals, by images
of viruses, of virtues
like everyone
Like exiled angels we swing out of the clouds
Above night city-
Fields of light broken by the curve of dark waterways

On the other side of the world
an unhappy teenage girl sets fire
to herself, her house, her neighbourhood and some that dwell therein
Sorry simulacrum of sad dawn

You’ve never seen everything

Sleep of the just, sleep of reason, any damn kind of sleep please!
I’m trying to balance on a sloping bed in Naples
or is it Skopje? I forget
Through the thin hotel wall a man groans in his dreams

And on the other side of the world
the drug squad busts a child’s birthday party
Puts bullets in the family dog and the blood goes all over the baby
And the Mounties are strip-searching schoolgirls
because they can

And a car crashes and burns on an offramp from the Gardiner
Two dogs in the back seat die, and in the front
a man and his mother
Forensics reveals the lady has pitchfork wounds in her chest –
Pitchfork!
And that the same or a similar instrument has been screwed to the dash
to make sure the driver goes too

You’ve never seen everything

I see:
A leader of the people with a ring in his nose
And the leaders of business tell him which way to go
With tugs on the golden chain which once led the golden calf
And we’re supposed to be impressed with their success
But my mind goes blank before the unbelievable indifference
shown life
spirit
the future
anything green
anything just

Bad pressure coming down
Tears – what we really traffic in
ride the ribbon of shadow
Never feel the light falling all around

Years ago when my brother was in India
A small town baker got a bright idea
He cut his flour with pesticide
and sent a bunch of neighbours on their longest journey
He was just being cheap -trying to make a profit
Didn’t even have shareholders to answer to

But it’s worth remembering, as we sell off the forest
gene-splice the world’s food into an instrument of control
maim and destroy as acts of theatre,
what came next –
That when the survivors looked around
and understood what had been done
they butchered
that baker

Snow swirls in the parking lot light like flour
like pesticide There’s a trade war brewing – or at least that’s the face they paint on it

But it’s only more transnational manipulation
It’s all bad magic and gangrene politics
Hormone disruptors and carcinogenetics
Greed twists eternal in the human breast
But the market has no brain
It doesn’t love it’s not God
All it knows is the price of lunch

Here I sit
Staring at my own shadow
Feeling my blood move
Trying not to have a drink
Trying to find somewhere to put the rage I’m carrying

Bad pressure coming down
Tears – what we really traffic in
ride the ribbon of shadow
Never feel the light falling all around
Never feel the light falling all around

In a horse-powered sleigh at the top of the town
sun coming up paints the snow all around with rose light

In front of the house where I’m supposed to be born
I don’t think I’m ready to walk through that door just yet

To be one more voice in the human choir
rising like smoke from the mystical fire of the heart

The wind that blows through everything
sweeps out the halls of my heart when I sing to you

It carries the moon and the stars and the rain
Carries the seagulls and carries my shame away

Spins me around, stops me running away
from all the things I’ve been waiting to say But don’t

Here
is bigger than you can imagine
Now
is forever

Sun coming up paints the snow all around
Rose on the roofs and the trees and the ground
And the stream
In my dream
Messenger wind swooping out of the sky
Lights each tiny speck in my human kaleidoscope
With hope

You’ve Never Seen Everything is Cockburn’s first full-length studio album since his 1999 critically acclaimed and JUNO Award winning Breakfast in New Orleans Dinner in Timbuktu. With a career that spans over three decades, countless tours and 27 albums, Cockburn has never stopped reflecting on political and social causes.

You’ve Never Seen Everything mirrors Cockburn’s deepening frustration with a world out of balance. Songs like the tense opening ‘Tried and Tested,’ the hypnotic ‘All Our Dark Tomorrows’ and, especially, the swirling jazz of ‘Trickle Down’ represent some of Cockburn’s most political songs since his ‘Call it Democracy’ and ‘If I Had a Rocket Launcher’ classics of the mid-1980s. Cockburn’s solution comes through in some of the most powerful songs of hope he’s ever written: the joyous ‘Open,’ the euphoric ‘Put It in Your Heart’ and the gorgeous closing ‘Messenger Wind.’

Co-produced with longtime associate Colin Linden, You’ve Never Seen Everything finds Cockburn collaborating with old friends as well as new acquaintances to create one of his most complete works yet. Guest vocalists include Emmylou Harris, Sarah Harmer, Jackson Browne and Sam Phillips.

Album InfoProduction notes:
Produced by Bruce Cockburn & Colin Linden
Recorded and Mixed by John Whynot
Additional recording by Colin Linden

except: Trickle Down written by Bruce Cockburn, Andy Milne and Carl Walker and published by Golden Mountain Music Corp./Triborg Publishing/Phoe13 Myuzik
and
Everywhere Dance written by Bruce Cockburn and Andy Milne and published by Golden Mountain Music Group Corp/Triborg Publishing. All songs SOCAN.

Grateful thanks to the following for their part in the making of these songs; the Infinite and his many agents; Marc Bregman; Don Cockburn; JenCockburn; Federico Fellini; Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hatiz (by way of Daniel Ladinsky); the hospitable folks in the Slocan Valley whose names, alas, I no longer recall; Andy Milne; Sally Sweetland; the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.

Thanks to M. J. Richardson for a beautiful place for Andy and me to work in, and for the following (possibly apocryphal) quote from Nostradamus:

“Come the millennium, month twelve, in the home of the greatest power, the village idiot will come forth to be acclaimed leader.”

Thanks to Debbie Van Dyke of Doctors Without Borders for her recording of the frogs of northern Zambia.

Thanks for the ongoing support of Judy Cade, Leslie Charbon, Bernie Finkelstein and all at True North, Sarah Ives, Sue Jenkins, John Laroque, Linda Manzer and Matt Talham.